On Sun, Aug 07, 2005 at 01:20:22PM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote:
...
>
> In a nutshell, Maudlin argues that these two common views on the
> matter are actually in contradiction. But frankly, although Maudlin's
> argument is complicated and involves all kinds of thought experiments and
> elaborate, imaginary machines, I think it is actually quite an obvious
> point. Supervenience means that implementation depends on what P does,
> while support for counterfactuals means that implementation depends on
> what P doesn't do. Q.E.D.! Maudlin merely takes great time and care
> to illustrate the contradiction in detail.
>
...
>
> Now to bring in the multiverse perspective, in the flavor I have been
> pursuing. From the viewpoint that says that all information objects
> exist and are distributed according to the Universal Distribution (UDist),
> what can we say about these questions?
>
The take home message I get from Maudlin's experiment is that a
computationalist consciousness is supervenient on a physical process
_spread_ over the multiverse, ie the counterfactuals must really exist
as alternate branches of the Multiverse.
A far as your UDist argument goes, the fact that a conscious HLUT, or
a conscious clock has very low measure simply means it is very
unlikely for us to be one of these things. They would still be
conscious. However accepting the Multiverse would eliminate these
objects from being conscious at all, because tof the lack of
counterfactuals.
--
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Received on Sun Aug 07 2005 - 19:40:08 PDT